The purpose of the orienting system is to position each apple so that it is at rest with its core extending vertically and with the stem end either up or down. In this position, the apple can be effectively transferred to a machine for peeling and coring the apple such as is shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,586,081 and 3,586,151.
Previous orienting systems employed a series of apple receptacles or cups, each with an eccentrically roating wheel located in the bottom of the cup and spring loaded wire fingers located at various points about the orienting conveyor such as is shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,586,081 and 3,738,474. One orienting system in current use employs a cup having sides that tilt at an angle to a horizontal plane to urge apples against another larger diameter wheel provided on the same shaft as that used to rotate the eccentric wheels. The larger wheel is adjacent to the interior edge of the cup and has a conical face which is rough or knurled as is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,169,528.
Apples are fed into each cup in the unoriented position. The larger wheel contacts apples which are situated with their cores horizontal and crosswise in the cup and aligns them by rotating them in a substantially horizontal plane. The rotating eccentric wheels in the bottom of each cup contact the side of the apple and turn it toward a vertical core orientation until the indent of the stem end or blossom end is reached. When the indent is reached, the wheels can no longer touch the apple so the apple remains in the vertically oriented position. The fingers used in the earlier orienting systems aid harder to orient apples by slightly turning them in the cup so the eccentric wheel can turn the apple on a different track, thus enabling the indent to be reached more quickly.
Some problems have been encountered with these systems. The fingers must be constantly adjusted so that they do not disorient an already oriented apple. The eccentric wheels are ineffective to turn some longer shaped apples to a point where their cores extend vertically. The larger wheel does not contact longer apples sufficiently to turn the apples so that the eccentric wheels can orient them. Long apples do not orient well with the previous systems because of their concave sides and their tendency to lay horizontally rather than to stand vertically.